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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder April 29, 2024
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Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine
Around the nation, peaceful campus protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are spreading. And they’re meeting with a rash of arrests by local police departments, dozens of school suspensions, and evictions from student dormitories. Many of those evicted have been students of colors, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. In New York, the NYPD arrested 108 students at Columbia University, and gave them 14 minutes to gather their belongings and leave their dormitories. New York University erected a plywood wall around Gould Plaza, an outdoor campus space in Greenwich Village, where police had earlier arrested protesting students.
All this because they took part at the large protest. Officials at Harvard University closed Harvard Yard in anticipation of possible protests and suspended the student group Palestine Solidarity Committee. Police arrested 9 students at the University of Minnesota for their refusal to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment. The California campus of Cal Poly Humboldt was shut down after students occupied a building. Shutitdown4Palestine.org
In an April 23 letter to the New York Times, nearly 60parents of students at Columbia and Barnard, from a variety of religious faiths ad social backgrounds wrote that they “find the actions taken by the administration deeply troubling and contrary to the principles of liberty, justice and academic freedom that are fundamental to the mission of higher education.”
Guest – Brian Becker is the director of the Answer Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.
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Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Regarded by many as the greatest journalist of our generation for exposing American war crimes Julian Assange is about to be extradited at America’s request to a federal criminal court in Virginia to be tried for his journalistic activities which exposed extensive murderous American crimes and embarrassed US government particularly the CIA.
Julian was a young computer genius in Australia. He figured out a way to receive information from whistleblowers anonymously. This was done in order to protect them when his publication company WikiLeaks revealed to the world the activities of the CIA, the American military and U. S. diplomats.
As published by WikiLeaks the Vault Seven revelations exposed the CIA had developed technologies to turn our cell phone into listening devices, even when turned off and tap our personal computers, and even control our automobiles. WikiLeaks exposed American torture in Afghanistan. They published a video of an American gunship helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians, even children, and two Reuters journalists on the streets of Baghdad.
Julian was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he holed up for seven years. Then five years ago the British police at America’s request removed him from the embassy and put him into solitary confinement in the notorious Belmarsh Prison.
Now the United States has succeeded in getting a compliant British court to extradite Julian , despite the law, preventing extradition of political prisoners, especially to a country that has the death penalty, and no guarantee of free speech for foreigners.
Guest – Vincent De Stefano is the National Organizing Director of the U.S. Julian Assange Defense Committee. Mr. De Stefano is on the Southern California ACLU board of directors and executive committee and he has worked with Amnesty International for more than four decades.
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Law and Disorder April 22, 2024
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It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
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Law and Disorder April 15, 2024
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Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
In the last six months of the war by Israel against the Palestinian population of Gaza, a truth has become quite clear: The war is not one of self-defense. And moreover, the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel is being used by the Netanyahu government as a pretext for ethnically cleansing the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there, and get them out of the Gaza Strip.
Israel, like America, is a colonial settlers state. It was built on top of an indigenous population whose removal was necessary to establish the new state of Israel. The Palestinians, who were the majority, never got their own state. Three quarters of 1 million of them were driven out, many ended up as refugees in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians in Gaza are now being systematically slaughtered by Israel and United States, which is a full partner in the whole operation, supplying weapons, money, and diplomatic cover.
The Israeli military is the fourth most powerful military in the world. Most of the native population has been driven into a tiny corner in the southern village of Rafa where Israel and America plan an imminent invasion. This, despite the story, spun by the Biden administration, they are trying to “moderate“ Israel. This is perception management. Israel is using starvation as a weapon. The Palestinian people are plagued by famine and disease. Israel is allowing food in at an inadequate trickle.
The United States ended its funding of the main United Nations support organization even as it continues, contrary to American law, to ship weapons to Israel, including 2000 pound bombs, 500 pound bombs, and jet fighters to deliver them.
Israel and the United States have crippled the United Nations and undermined international law. The International Court of Justice , the highest court in the world,ruled that Israel was “plausibly committing” a genocide. This ruling has been ignored by Israel and the United States.
Guest – OR Books associate editor Jamie Stern Weiner author of the recently published book Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. His previous books include Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions and Antisemitism and the Labour Party.
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Pro-Palestine Protestors Target of Covert Israel Campaign
Well, the cat is now definitely “out of the bag”. What many of us have long suspected, our guest today has now documented. It is that the Israeli government created a task force to plan and carry out a covert campaign to disrupt and punish pro-Palestinian protesters on the college and university campuses of the United States. And the plan is in full operation. It was first reported in the Israeli website Ynetnews, one of the largest and greatly respected media outlets in Israel.
So far, the western media has largely ignored this shocking news. The task force is chaired by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and led by various senior government officials. The task force has been in operation for some years and has already achieved some success in its efforts to stifle the growing anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian movement in the United States.
Guest – Professor William Robinson is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. He is also a member of the Affiliated Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies, all at the University of California, at Santa Barbara. Prof. Robinson’s most recent books are: The Global Police State, the book Global Civil War, and the book Can Global Capitalism Endure? And in 2017 he and Maryam Griffin together published: We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics.
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